yllus
Elite Member & Lifer
If you've ever wondered at the details of the ongoing war in Chechnya, here's your chance to consume the details of how it started in one 7-page article (according to one journalist).
I've chopped it up and summarized as best as I could. Particularly interesting? Watch how an alleged bombing attack on a Moscow apartment building is thwarted - after hundreds of deaths from similar attacks - leading Putin's popularity to soar skywards. Oddly, the suspects in the foiled attack are found to be carrying FSB (aka KGB) identification... At which point the attack is explained away as a drill. Yeah.
Thirteen years of Chechen agony
I've chopped it up and summarized as best as I could. Particularly interesting? Watch how an alleged bombing attack on a Moscow apartment building is thwarted - after hundreds of deaths from similar attacks - leading Putin's popularity to soar skywards. Oddly, the suspects in the foiled attack are found to be carrying FSB (aka KGB) identification... At which point the attack is explained away as a drill. Yeah.
Thirteen years of Chechen agony
For 13 years, an on-again, off-again war has been waged in the tiny Russian republic of Chechnya.
The first thing to understand about the war in Chechnya--or, at least, the most recent war in Chechnya -- is that it was not caused by oil lust, despite the fact that the mountainous republic is so full of crude that exploding Russian carpet bombs have been known to kick up fountains of black, sticky goo.
Nor was it caused by the spread of militant Islam, even though a few radical Wahhabis had found their way to Chechnya by the second round of fighting. After a brief period of co-operation, these interlopers began to fight with the Chechens themselves, who practise a mystical form of Islam known as Sufism, and who, as such, frown on any interpretation of Islam that does not allow meditation, ecstatic dancing, the education of women and graveyard Koran readings.
No -- when a drunk and heart-diseased Boris Yeltsin ordered his troops into Grozny in 1994, he largely did it out of reflex. Chechnya was first plundered by Cossacks in the mid-1700s and, again, in the 1800s, when a notoriously psychopathic Russian general named Yermolev became famous for claiming that, "the only good Chechen is a dead Chechen." (Showing a typical degree of cultural sensitivity, the Russians later erected a statue to Yermolev smack-dab in the middle of Grozny.) The Chechens were then beset upon by the Red Army, the White Army and then Stalin himself, who dealt with the "Chechen problem" in a way that was nothing if not thorough: In 1943 he loaded every Chechen man, woman and child into cattle cars, and shipped them all to Kazakhstan.
Of course, the usual atrocities ensued: starvation, disease, rape, the dead propped up on their feet in stifling, overheated cars, etc. The Chechens were allowed to return to their homes in 1957, only to find them filled with ethnic Russians, who had moved south to take advantage of cheap land and energizing mountain views.
When the Soviet Union disassembled in 1991, Chechnya, not surprisingly, wished to join the departing fray. Moscow said no. It did, however, allow the republic a sort of parliamentary quasi-independence. The Chechens responded by voting in a corrupted maniac named Jokhar Dudayev who, ironically enough, had once been a general in the Russian army.
Chechnya's decline into villainy and organized crime was immediate. Government officials enriched themselves by illegally selling oil abroad at deflated prices. Grozny became a hub of black marketeering -- by 1992, between 100 and 150 unsanctioned flights carrying every sort of contraband landed daily at the Grozny airport. Chechen mafiosi raided cargo trains as though they were Wild West stagecoaches. Arms dealing became epidemic, as did banking scams, kidnapping and the production of counterfeit currencies.
On Nov. 29, 1994, Yeltsin ordered 40,000 Russian troops into Chechnya. What hadn't occurred to Yeltsin was that Dudayev had been waiting for this day since taking power in 1991. He had built up an army made up primarily of convicts who'd won their freedom with the fall of the Soviet empire, and had trained them well in guerrilla warfare. They were a formidable crew. Again and again, Chechen fighters lured tanks into traps, or fired upon lost soldiers from sniper nests, or lobbed grenades from ingeniously placed bunkers.
The Russian attacks, on the other hand, showed a lack of strategy, reconnaissance and reinforcement. At the very least, Yeltsin could have waited until summer, when his soldiers wouldn't have had to slog through knee-high mud and blinding fog. They retreated. Yeltsin, humiliated and furious, ordered hell to rain down.
Ahhh, the statistics of war. In Sarajevo at its worst, 3,500 detonations per day. In Grozny, that winter: 4,000 per hour. A city of 400,000 reduced to just 40,000. Food, clean water, electricity -- all gone. The oil derricks, toppled and useless. People survived, barely, by burning their furniture and boiling roots into soup.
New Yorker editor David Remnick, who visited Grozny once the shelling finally stopped, and whose reportage shapes my image of the destruction, described it this way: "The centre of Grozny -- a city centre as big, it seemed to me, as Baltimore -- was an utter ruin. Block after block, street after street. Every apartment building in sight. The Chekhov Library. The art museum. The oil and gas institute. Mosques and churches, hospitals and schools, a cognac factory, a nursing home, the sports stadium the indoor arena. Gutted, destroyed-- all of it."
Once the bombings stopped, helicopters swooped in and strafed whatever buildings were left standing -- Grozny soon looked like Kabul, albeit a Kabul made from grey Swiss cheese. The Russians set up "filtration camps" to weed out freedom fighters from the general population; predictably, these degenerated into torture camps. One, known infamously as Chernokosovo, greeted arrivals with a banner reading, "Welcome to Hell."
Throughout, the Kremlin referred to the campaign as a "police action" conducted to remove a few unsanctioned "military installations." Casualties, Yeltsin claimed, were "negligible."
In April, 1996, Jokhar Dudayev was killed by a Russian missile when his satellite phone gave away his location.
Even so, the Russians were exhausted. By August, Shamil Bashayev's forces had driven the Russian army out of Grozny, thus cementing the myth of Chechen indominability. By the end of that month, a peace deal had been brokered, and the first round of fighting ended. It was at this point that the war in Chechnya took a sharp turn toward the bleakly surreal.
In the space of 18 days the following month, four apartment buildings blew up in Russia-- two in Moscow, one in Volgadonsk and one in a town called Buinaksk. Deaths were in the several hundreds. All through the country, apartment dwellers took turns standing watch throughout the night, or left altogether to sleep in their dachas. The Russian government, naturally, blamed Chechen aggression.
Again, suspicions were ignited. Firstly, these buildings were not so much exploded as atomized. I have seen photos of the aftermath in Moscow, and the work was astounding in its sheer precision: apartment building, apartment building, eerily symmetrical gap where an apartment building once stood, apartment building, apartment building?
This, many thought, was well beyond the ability of a Chechen black-widow bomber, and had to have been the work of someone with access to both building plans and the luxury of planting the explosives at strategic points.
Also -- why would the Chechens do it? Why, when they'd already embarrassed the invading Slavs? Why, when they enjoyed a sort of parliamentary independence, and had been free to resume the drug running, arms dealing and illegal oil selling that had been so rudely interrupted by the first invasion? Fingers -- and this was before Putin shut down independent media in Russia -- pointed towards the FSB, the latest incarnation of the Russian secret police.
Then: On Sept. 22, 1999, in a city southwest of Moscow called Ryazan, a city bus driver noticed a white Lada parked in front of an apartment building at 14/16 Novosyelov St.
The police then made a natural decision: They called the FSB, which promptly arrived and hauled all the evidence away. That night, Russian news programs reported that the FSB and local police had saved the citizens of Ryazan from yet another terrorist bombing.
It was an explanation that might have stuck had something truly appalling (and indicative of FSB laziness) not occurred: The local police in Ryazan found the white Lada the next day, and managed to arrest two of the "terrorists." Both men, curiously enough, carried identification showing them to be FSB agents.
This time, the local police acted more astutely: They contacted the media, and the as-yet-to-be-shut-down press reported that the FSB had apparently been caught red-handed trying to bomb Russian citizens. On Sept. 24, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev exited the Kremlin, and gave reporters the "official" story. Yes, the FSB had placed those sacks in the basement of 14/16 Novosyelov St.. The bags, however, had contained sugar and not hexogen. The false reading from the gas analyzer had been caused by improper cleaning of the device. The same alertness test had been performed on many other cities, but only Ryazan had passed with such flying colours. He congratulated its people on their vigilance.
Shortly thereafter -- again, I am not making this up-- the FSB held an award ceremony in Ryazan, in which the bus driver was given a television set as a reward for quick thinking.
The following week, Russian forces invaded Chechnya, citing Islamist strikes in Moscow, Volgodonsk, Buinaksk and, of course, the Republic of Dagestan. Vladimir Putin, who had been appointed Yeltsin's presidential successor in August, and was jockeying to maintain that status, called it an "antiterrorist action."
Bafflingly, Putin's popularity soared.
The Russian army has occupied Grozny ever since. There has been more bombing and strafing, though mostly in outlaying towns viewed to be Islamist strongholds, there being precious little left to bomb or strafe left in Grozny. Some days, there is electricity in the capital. Some days, there is not. The university has re-opened, though its male population is noticeably meagre: Young men are routinely picked up during middle-of-the-night zachistki, a Russian word meaning, more or less, "mopping up."
